Deep Throat makes top 100
By Bob Preston
Thursday, October 5, 2006
LOS ANGELES — When
Deep Throat hit movie theaters in the summer of 1972, Screw Magazine's Al Goldstein gave it a glowing review, 23 states banned it, and it went on to become the highest-grossing adult movie of its time.
Who knew that it would ever make the same list as
Citizen Kane, Vertigo and
Pulp Fiction?
Radio Times magazine named
Deep Throat to a list of 100 landmark films that had a large cultural impact. Other movies on the list include
The Birth of a Nation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Blade Runner and
Brokeback Mountain.
According to the Radio Times,
Deep Throat was the worst movie to make the list, but it took "porn out of the back room and into the cinema."
Fenton Bailey, co-director of the 2005 documentary
Inside Deep Throat, wholeheartedly agrees with the blue movie's inclusion on the list, and with the assertion that it changed the landscape of adult entertainment and sexuality.
"It's a very important movie," Bailey told XFANZ. "It captures so many ideas from the sexual revolution, and one of its unintended consequences is that it marked the end of the sexual revolution and the beginning of the commodification of sex and sexuality."
Deep Throat was also the most profitable adult movie of its time, and one of the most profitable adult movies ever. Box office experts dispute its final tally, but even conservative estimates put its total gross at more than $100 million.
"It woke everyone up," Bailey said. "They said, 'Oh, my god! There's gold in porn!'"
But despite the gobs of money it made, does it really belong on the same list as
Citizen Kane and
Vertigo?
Bailey said yes.
"
Deep Throat is a far more important movie than
Citizen Kane or
Pulp Fiction," Bailey said. "Those movies were great artistic statements, but they had no impact on the culture. We live in the porn age, and it's seeping into every aspect of our lives."
